Who needs online reviews anyway?

Who needs online reviews anyway? What’s all the uproar about reviews?

Let’s face it, as business owner, we all need reviews. Good reviews bring customers to your business. I recently read that 88% of business that have greater than 5 reviews will rank better than a business that has no reviews.

So I decided to conduct a study using one of my new customers. Customer “A” started out with no “Google Reviews”. With help from customer and a tool from WhiteSpark . Thanks to Phil Rozek for sharing this information and to giving me a few suggestions. We modified the handout by adding “Yelp” and “Foursquare” to the process. We than printed and had customer “A” hand them out to their customer.

This process netted customer “A” 5 Google Reviews, 6 Yelp and no “Foursquare Reviews” in a 32 day period, with 75 handouts. It’s about a 15% percent return on the handout.

The most import thing I observed during this time frame was about 6 points increase in the customers PA (I use the Moz tool bar addin for chrome).

So make no mistake that reviews are important to the business. In “The 2104 Local Search Ranking Factors” conducted by Moz.com reviews accounted for 9.8%. What will the account for in 2015? Only time will tell.

My moral to the story of reviews is like the “Little Red Train” I think I can, I think I can get reviews.

Here are few good reads on review process.

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